February 04, 2009

Building New York - the Long Island Sandminers

You're standing by the side of the road when a dump truck hauls into view,
one of the big ones, filled with sand. It's closely followed by another, and
another, an endless procession. If you stay by the road until the procession has
finally passed, you will have been standing there for forty days (and forty
nights) as six million trucks have trundled by (assuming that they're moving
along at a good thirty miles an hour). And where were these trucks going? Well,
it's symbolic, obviously, but they were going to build New York City. And where
had they come from? Long Island.

In 1865, mining began on the northern shore of Long Island, to collect sand
washed out from retreating ice age glaciers. Immigrant workers from Europe, many
from Sardinia, others from Poland, Ireland, and Scandinavia, first hauled sand
with wheelbarrows; the excavations grew with mechanization, and eventually the
cliffs and the landscape were levelled. Port Washington, and the peninsula
jutting out into Long Island Sound only seventeen miles east of Manhattan, was
the center of the business, as endless convoys of barges carried the sand to the
city's construction sites. At the peak of production, the equivalent of fifty
dump truck loads of sand left every hour, filling fifty barges a day. The last
sandpit closed in the 1990s, by which time more than 200 million tons of sand
had been excavated to build the city—bridges, highways, the Empire State
Building, the Chrysler Building, and the World Trade Center. The sand, typical
of that left behind by the brutality of the glaciers, was poorly sorted,
containing a range of grain sizes that packed together very effectively to
make
good, strong, concrete. As Al Marino, a worker in the pits, is quoted as saying:
“The sand we got in the Port Washington sandbanks is fantastic. . . . It has
life in it. It’s the best sand you could get for making concrete—just the right
combination of coarse and fine grains. You go to the beach and you take that
sand. And if you make concrete out of that it would fall apart, because there’s
no life in it” (Elly Shodell, Port Washington Public Library - a wonderful
website on the people and the operations, including her book, full of personal
testimonies and illustrations - http://www.pwpl.org/localhistory/sandmine/index.html).

The operations were huge, and covered a vast area along the shore known as
"sand alley." Today, much of the land has been rehabilitated and it would be
difficult to sense the scale of the mining history (see the images below);
inevitably, a number of golf courses now occupy the sites of the old sand mines
where movie companies used to come to film desert scenes. But sandbanks choke
the harbor and the effect on the topography will last a long time. Dr J. Bret
Bennington, at Hofstra University on Long Island, has used digital elevation
mapping to reconstruct the comings and goings (mainly the goings) of the
glaciers and the map images are available on his website - see http://people.hofstra.edu/J_B_Bennington/research/long_island/li.html.
Look carefully at these, and the scar of the "sand alley" on the eastern side of
the Port Washington Peninsula is dramatically visible (image below).

But to return to the people. At the height of the industry, there were dozens
of companies and thousands of workers - and their families. It was hard and
dangerous work - loosely consolidated granular materials behaving as they do,
there were many collapses and cave-ins of the work face, burying the sandminers.
The history of the Long Island sandminers and their communities is an
extraordinary one. Many retired workers still live in the area, some in their
90s, and their oral history, as recorded by Elly Shodell, is a fascinating
social document. And they are finally getting a memorial.

The idea of honoring the sandminers, the immigrant community who built New
York, and their industry, originated ten years ago, and resulted in the forming
of the Sandminers Monument Group (http://www.sandminers.com/index.html).
Thanks largely to private donations, the idea has turned into reality and, last
August, the ground was broken for the memorial around the last remaining shaft
entrance. The monument will be by sculptor Edward Jonas, and will feature a
group of sandminers and a hand pouring sand into New York City. Fitting indeed.

The story is told of the Italian immigrant in the late 1800s in New York who
learned three things on arrival: "First, the streets aren't paved with gold.
Second, they aren't paved at all. And third, you're expected to pave them.''